There are 249 days remaining until Election Day 2024 when America will choose between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Yesterday, both men — the president and the deranged demagogue — visited America’s southern border, which can charitably be described as existing in a space between complete fiasco and utter clusterf@%k.
I have written many warnings about the importance of understanding the currency of chaos in the coming election. Trump wants chaos, so he can promise order. The greater the frenzy, the better it is for Trump. This is the most basic political tactic used by any aspiring strongman in literally any election during which they hope winning is the gateway to subverting freedom in favor of their power. Power is a deadly instrument in the wrong hands. It has killed more human beings than any disease, and there seems to be no cure.
The spectacle at the border was deeply depressing. Trump went there looking for ways to make a bad situation worse, so as to hurt America enough to inspire the hopelessness necessary to persuade a small sliver of the electorate that he is the better and safer choice than Biden. He is utterly unhinged and unmoored from basic facts and reality as a matter of course, yet he remains ahead in the polls. His policy builds on his promise to build a wall — which he didn’t do — with an even more ludicrous spurt of venom, referring to the migrant crisis as the “Biden invasion.”
Meanwhile during his visit, President Biden decided to reach out to Trump, asking Trump to “join me” in solving a problem for the country:
Instead of playing politics with the issue, why don’t we just get together and get it done?
Great idea, right?
I have to admit something. I very rarely have this desire, but I wished I had been in the room to see the scene when someone thought that it was a good idea for the president to say this, as opposed to kicking the shit out of the greatest threat to face America since the Confederacy and the fascists.
There is a basic truth at hand in this election because, at its core, the election is about a very big thing. It is about the darkness and the light. What I’m trying to say is that it is existential. Something has gone terribly wrong in America, and it isn’t going to get better until the last of the baby boomers is gone from office. We must hang on until then, and make the best choice possible, which of course is President Biden over a deranged fascist braying for mass deportations, revenge, vengeance and death in between his various criminal trials. Yet, there remains a deep dissatisfaction in the choice because the biggest things — the necessary things — are not being discussed. Trump is assaulting the cornerstone of our civilization and way of life.
I thought it might be useful to summon some wise words from the not-so-distant past. Below is a message from General Dwight David Eisenhower at his inaugural address. Listen to the wisdom of a great president and a true Republican. Let us apply this message to the great choice ahead in all we do. We must recognize what is at stake, and what it is that Trump is. It is something unholy. He is a fascist. Listen to Ike. There was a reason the slogan “I like Ike” was so simple.
The world and we have passed the midway point of a century of continuing challenge. We sense with all our faculties that forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed, as rarely before in history.
This fact defines the meaning of this day. We are summoned by this honored and historic ceremony to witness more than the act of one citizen swearing his oath of service, in the presence of God. We are called as a people to give testimony in the sight of the world to our faith that the future shall belong to the free.
Since this century's beginning, a time of tempest has seemed to come upon the continents of the earth. Masses of Asia have awakened to strike off shackles of the past. Great nations of Europe have fought their bloodiest wars. Thrones have toppled and their vast empires have disappeared. New nations have been born.
For our own country, it has been a time of recurring trial. We have grown in power and in responsibility. We have passed through the anxieties of depression and of war to a summit unmatched in man's history. Seeking to secure peace in the world, we have had to fight through the forests of the Argonne to the shores of Iwo Jima, and to the cold mountains of Korea.
In the swift rush of great events, we find ourselves groping to know the full sense and meaning of these times in which we live. In our quest of understanding, we beseech God's guidance. We summon all our knowledge of the past and we scan all signs of the future. We bring all our wit and all our will to meet the question:
How far have we come in man's long pilgrimage from darkness toward the light? Are we nearing the light--a day of freedom and of peace for all mankind? Or are the shadows of another night closing in upon us?
Great as are the preoccupations absorbing us at home, concerned as we are with matters that deeply affect our livelihood today and our vision of the future, each of these domestic problems is dwarfed by, and often even created by, this question that involves all humankind.
This trial comes at a moment when man's power to achieve good or to inflict evil surpasses the brightest hopes and the sharpest fears of all ages. We can turn rivers in their courses, level mountains to the plains. Oceans and land and sky are avenues for our colossal commerce. Disease diminishes and life lengthens.
Yet the promise of this life is imperiled by the very genius that has made it possible. Nations amass wealth. Labor sweats to create--and turns out devices to level not only mountains but also cities. Science seems ready to confer upon us, as its final gift, the power to erase human life from this planet.
At such a time in history, we who are free must proclaim anew our faith. This faith is the abiding creed of our fathers. It is our faith in the deathless dignity of man, governed by eternal moral and natural laws.
This faith defines our full view of life. It establishes, beyond debate, those gifts of the Creator that are man's inalienable rights, and that make all men equal in His sight.
In the light of this equality, we know that the virtues most cherished by free people--love of truth, pride of work, devotion to country--all are treasures equally precious in the lives of the most humble and of the most exalted. The men who mine coal and fire furnaces, and balance ledgers, and turn lathes, and pick cotton, and heal the sick and plant corn--all serve as proudly and as profitably for America as the statesmen who draft treaties and the legislators who enact laws.
This faith rules our whole way of life. It decrees that we, the people, elect leaders not to rule but to serve. It asserts that we have the right to choice of our own work and to the reward of our own toil. It inspires the initiative that makes our productivity the wonder of the world. And it warns that any man who seeks to deny equality among all his brothers betrays the spirit of the free and invites the mockery of the tyrant.
It is because we, all of us, hold to these principles that the political changes accomplished this day do not imply turbulence, upheaval or disorder. Rather this change expresses a purpose of strengthening our dedication and devotion to the precepts of our founding documents, a conscious renewal of faith in our country and in the watchfulness of a Divine Providence.
The enemies of this faith know no god but force, no devotion but its use. They tutor men in treason. They feed upon the hunger of others. Whatever defies them, they torture, especially the truth.
Here, then, is joined no argument between slightly differing philosophies. This conflict strikes directly at the faith of our fathers and the lives of our sons. No principle or treasure that we hold, from the spiritual knowledge of our free schools and churches to the creative magic of free labor and capital, nothing lies safely beyond the reach of this struggle.
Freedom is pitted against slavery; lightness against the dark
The faith we hold belongs not to us alone but to the free of all the world.
Steve, again, we disagree.
I think Biden's words "Instead of playing politics with the issue, why don’t we just get together and get it done?" WERE PERFECT. Taking what had been a political advantage for Trump (and the GOP) and turning it around on them. Showing the advantage Biden's decades of political experience gives him.
TGIF and GO JOE!!!! ;-)
I believe Joe Biden is smart enough to be absolutely certain Trump would NEVER take him up on working together on anything!!!! So who looks bad, Trump not Biden.